A/N: Cross-posted from tumblr where i'm rediscovering my work ethic in tracking down any hint of this ever elusive pairing (aka i couldn't find much and had to cope on my lonesome via fic)
Etymology of Attraction
Summary: The day when Gou realized that Nagisa now towered over her was one that would forever live in infamy. Puberty was a bitch that needed to pay one swim team manager's therapy bills.
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Out of all the finger-cracking administration work that was involved with being manager of the swim team, Matsuoka Gou found that fundraisers were the easiest.
"Swimsuits," she muttered fiercely under her breath, "We'll put them all in swimsuits and sell them off, one by one. It's the triceps. The golden triceps are made of money!" Her hands moved lightning fast over the consent forms, causing their adviser to droop in fear.
"Um, Kou, isn't this a little…uh, morally unsound—"
Gou's head snapped up and she shot a calculating look to the homeroom teacher. "Eh? The school is making us pay for the upkeep of the pool. Heating bills don't come cheap! Plus the swimsuits and the goggles and the—"
"Gou!"
A cheery voice cried out from the doorway and Miho breathed a sigh of relief the same time Gou rankled at the sound. Clutching her pen, she pretended to be completely invested in the forms before her and not in the beaming blonde swimmer that had just walked in.
He frowned slightly when Gou didn't respond, the dripping towel around him slouching down as he did so. But as he saw Miho, Nagisa's smile widened. "Ama-chan! Did you lose a bet with Rei or something, I thought it was his turn to oversee Gou?"
"Bet?"
"Oversee!"
Miho blinked in surprise as Nagisa's face seemed to brighten quickly as he turned to face the fuming swim manager. He said wonderingly, "Ah, so I do exist to Gou. I thought a magic djinn had come along and cast a spell to make me invisible. It's good to see that's been avoided!"
As cute as he looked while smiling, Gou wasn't fazed in the slightest, a year of practice making her more than ready to taking on someone as effortlessly charming as him. Pouting, she folded her arms and repeated, "Oversee? What kind of oversee?"
Nagisa leaned against the back of her chair as he pretended to think. "Hmmm, that's tricky. Is it the oversee Makoto is on to make sure Rei and Haru don't start making out in the pool again, or it is the oversee everyone rotates to make sure Gou doesn't sell our bodies to the highest bidder?"
Her face turned a deep shade of red as she stuttered, "Sell…your bodies? I would never! Only Haru's triceps! And pecs!"
Miho let out a nervous chuckle at the completely serious face Gou was making. Nagisa stopped smiling for the first time in the conversation as his face fell in a strange sort of disappointment, only to come back quickly as he seemed to notice something. Leaning in closer, he met her eyes and commented cryptically, "Gou must be a very motivated manager to keep arguing even when pool water is dripping on her skirt."
"Wha—" Gou started, only to jump up and out of her seat when she realized that the tips of Nagisa's wet towel had been slowly dropping water on her. She hadn't even felt it. He began to laugh and pushed away from the chair to stand besides Miho. "Why didn't you move away, you—"
She raised her head to start screaming at him in full, only to freeze when her head kept raising higher. And higher. She looked up further to find herself finally staring at Nagisa's face, which was brimming with blatant amusement.
He was still flushed from swim practice, his cheeks tinted pink and his eyes buzzing and bright pink. Water was still dripping from his blond mop of hair as well, beads of it trailing down his temple and jaw to swerve into the sinews of his neck, where they continued down until they met the muscle of an impressively toned chest that was still rising and falling fast with exertion.
A towel was draped around his shoulders and hid the uppermost of his arms, but they did little in concealing the obvious lean muscle tone building beneath. Something in her stomach churned wildly at the thought of how big those triceps had to be to match up with the rest of his physique.
"You…" Gou managed to force out, her mind stuttering to a halt under all the new information it was struggling to process.
Nagisa was tall. And buff.
And as he flashed a smile at her quiet distress, Gou realized that she had to add handsome to the list as well.
The usual hero-worship that rose when she was met with a member of the incredibly lust-worthy-body club started to rise, her heart beating erratically and her eyes beginning to grow wide.
It conflicted with the usual sensory input that came from being around the irritatingly chatty Nagisa, the burning ball of anger in her chest flaring and her throat tightening in frustration. When faced with the dilemma of what to say to your begrudging best friend-slash-swim team member, Gou found herself unable to come up with a single thing. Except for—
"Go away!"
Her feet began to move before she even registered the words being spat from her mouth, her mind racing too fast to care about Miho's cry of surprise as the adviser juggled an object in her hands.
Gou moved to race out the door and to a place where she could plant herself down and think, attempting to push her way past the current object of attention in her thoughts to get there.
The only problem was that he didn't let her. "Huh? Why do you want me to do that? Gou?"
Nagisa trapped her with an arm braced against the table, pushing her closer to the stack of papers she had previously been obsessing over. "Go away!" she cried again in desperation, her face reddening at his proximity as well as the realization that she'd have to push her way past him and his impossibly muscular arm that'd she could have sworn hadn't been there yesterday.
And then his towel slipped.
Gou pursed her lips to keep from crying out. It was better than she could have dreamed.
Frowning, he didn't notice when her gaze drifted from the door to being utterly enraptured by the hard line of his shoulder that curved into his arm and, more notably, his triceps. Gou struggled to break free from her fixation, reminding herself over and over again that this was Nagisa. For one deliriously horrible moment, the reminder only served to send her heart racing further.
"Gou? Is something wrong? Gou?" Nagisa repeated, his eyes wide with unneeded concern at the strange fact that his best friend and team manager had suddenly burst into a random bout of extreme psychosis at nothing else than having a couple drops of water tarnishing her skirt.
Feeling pressured and down to the wire, Gou tried one last time to escape, forgetting herself for a moment as she tried to physically push away from him. Nagisa didn't seem affected, his confusion only growing as she shoved against him. When she attempted to, of all things, body slam him out of the way, he just neatly picked her up with an expression full of resolve.
"What happened, Gou?" he demanded as his eyebrows scrunched together in determination, oblivious to the sudden redness of her cheeks. Gou kept trying to struggle her way out of his grip, attempting to steadfastly ignore the fact that he could hold her up without so much as a smallest indicator of strain on his part.
His arms were solidly linked around her in a way that gave her no purpose for a well-placed kick or punch, but still she tried to wriggle her way out while pretending not to notice how nice the flat planes of his chest felt pressed against hers.
Frustrated in more ways than one, Gou could only snap back her long ingrained reply, "My. Name. Is. Kou!"
"Gou!" Nagisa cried back, his mouth twisting into a pout at her peevish nature as they fell back into the rhythm of their usual arguments, albeit closer than usual. With each spat word, their faces grew closer.
"Kou!"
"Gou!"
"K-Kou," she struggled to say, only to be stopped at the slow realization dawning in his face. She begin to freeze in his arms as Nagisa's gaze focused on her rising blush to the dilation of her dark eyes and then finally, to her quick and short breaths.
She tried to keep glaring, only to fall into a confusion of her own when his face turned from calculating to strange sort of wondering, the pink of his iris glittering as he breathed out, "…Gou?"
Clenching her eyes shut, Gou braced herself and waited for the accompanying jokes and taunts that would undoubtedly came. He was a mischievous little kid to the core, no matter how developed his outer shell had suddenly become. This wouldn't be good.
The sudden soft pressure against her lips said otherwise.
What?
Her eyes snapped open to see Nagisa grinning like he had won the match of his life and not done something infinitely more out of character, like kiss her.
"Huh, what are you—!" Gou began to say, before he did it again, pulling her closer as he pressed her lips against hers as a laugh burst from his throat, a rumble so deep she felt it, as well as the grin he sporting.
Angry, she pushed back on her own, deepening the kiss while all the while cursing him in her mind. He tasted like chlorine, she thought hazily through the heated movement of their lips. It was a given seeing as how he'd just returned from the pool, but the thought just made her stomach turn and chest burn, her arms pulling from her sides to twine around his neck.
Nagisa just seemed more and more amused as his grin widened to the point where when she finally had to break away just to breathe, because she wasn't gifted with a champion swimmer's lungs, he was laughing to himself again.
As she took in the beaming expression on his face, another, more out of place realization struck her as to the strange behavior he'd had lately whenever she was praising the physiques of other enemy swimmers.
Gou hit him suddenly, crying, "Why didn't you tell me!"
"Ah, come on," Nagisa said with a chuckle, seeming to know exactly what he was talking about, "You would've thought it was a joke, Gou."
She began to pummel him with soft strikes, half because he still hadn't learned to call her Kou and half because how dare he, of all people, be the one to know her so well? So much so that he even remembered from all those years ago when they were in grade-school and she'd bragged about the origins of her name as much as she could. Before others had begun teasing her for how masculine it sounded.
She'd stopped using it soon after that, but it seemed like one person still knew just how proud she was of it.
And it really was hard hating a name that he would say so adoringly.
From the sidelines, Miho watched in mixed fear and relief. A phone hung from her limp hand, having been there the moment Nagisa had started teasing the swim manager.
With a quick swipe of her finger, she forwarded the video of the exchange to the rest of the team, glad that today had been her day on duty to oversee the growing and eventual climax of the romantic tension between Matsuoka Gou and Nagisa Hazuki.